This book examines cross-cultural encounters of the Jesuit missionary enterprise in early modern Southwest Asia. It analyzes the early mission to Syria, paying attention to the key interlocutors of the Jesuits and the many challenges they experienced in their exchanges with other Europeans, Ottoman officials, and Eastern Christians. It demonstrates that there was nominal Muslim-Christian dialogue and important relationships formed between the Jesuits and their Christian and Muslim hosts. The Jesuits in Syria shows that the Jesuits worked in a very complex environment, where competing factions of Europeans, European religious, Eastern Christians, Arab Muslims, Turkish officials, and Turkish Muslims, not to mention “renegades,” played important roles.
The book examines missionary correspondence and other complementary sources. It also contrasts the way that the Jesuits wrote about their efforts internally with how they addressed the same topics in “public” documents, either printed or manuscript. It shows that the Jesuits described Islam and Syria in several ways, depending on the nature of the sources. For internal audiences, they wrote of their challenges with Franciscans, French, and Venetian consular figures, and Ottoman officials. For the broader public, whether in Jesuit colleges or in print, they harped on the problems posed by “schismatics” and Muslims. In this way, this volume enriches the story of the early modern Mediterranean.